Part 5

But why does every proper boy like to climb, and every proper girl too, if she has lived in the country and had a proper chance? About the first thing most of us did, as soon as we learned to creep, was to head for the nearest stairs, and try to climb up. When we get a little older, we cannot so much as set eyes on a fence or a shed roof without wanting to be on top of it; while as for trees, who of us, at a certain age, is satisfied until he has been to the top of every tree in the neighborhood. As for climbing mountains, that is one of the greatest games there is. So there is a climbing instinct in us, as well as a throwing instinct and a hit-something-with-a-bat instinct.

Now our wild ancestors who fished and hunted and played Indians for a living probably did not do much climbing. But long before their day we had certain still more ancient ancestors who were only half human and lived in the trees; and long before these, in turn, were still older ancestors who were not human at all, but regular apes who had hands in place of feet, and could climb like monkeys. These spent their lives in the trees; and in memory of them, each of us in turn, before he is quite old enough to play bat and ball games, is possessed to climb like a monkey, and climbs almost as surely and well.

Some people say, too, that the reason why a drowning person throws up his hands (the very worst thing he possibly could do under the circumstances) is that, being quite crazy with fear, he forgets completely his surroundings, remembers only the dim and far off time when the tree-folk escaped danger by climbing up out of the way, and reaches up for an imaginary branch which hasn’t been there these many thousand years. Perhaps this is so; for my part, I believe it is. At any rate, there is the wonderful grip of the new-born babe. Where did he get it if not by climbing trees, or clinging to his mother when she fled with him thru the branches?

Some people say also that the reason why we like to play hide-and-seek is that our ape ancestors, and our half-human ancestors, and our wild ancestors, and our half civilized ancestors, down to considerably after the time when the school histories begin, have spent no small part of their days stealing softly upon their enemies and the wild creatures they were hunting for food, or else hiding all mousey quiet while some enemy or wild beast is hunting after them.

There are a few people even who say that the reason why we like to go in swimming (we do like it, do we not?) is that in some sort of dim way we remember a still more ancient forebear who lived all the time in the water, who in short, was a veritable fish and did nothing else but swim. I don’t believe this myself. Not that we did not have such an ancestor—there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that. But it all happened so very, very long ago that it doesn’t seem possible that there should be any trace of those days left. Still who can tell?

At any rate, we like to do a vast number of things that our forebears had to do whether they liked them or not; and if you can think of any other reason than this why you like baseball and hide-and-seek and climbing and dolls, I wish you would tell me.

XIV

Animals’ Games

Now that we know why boys play with balls and bats, and girls play with dolls, let us see if we can make out why kittens play with strings and puppies bark after wagons.

Perhaps you have already guessed. The grown up house cat and wild cat get a living all or in part by hunting birds and mice. They crouch close to the ground, creep slowly upon their prey; then seize it with a rush. That is just what the kitten does when you drag some small object slowly across the floor. The kitten doesn’t know why it chases a spool on a string. Really, however, it is playing at hunting small creatures, as its ancestors have hunted them in reality for a million generations.

Puppies are different from kittens. They don’t care much about spools and strings; but they like to run about over the fields and chew up their owner’s shoes. Now the wild dogs, and their cousins the wolves, do not go out alone and hunt small animals as the cats do. They go in packs; and they hunt large animals, wild sheep, wild oxen, deer, which they chase, sometimes, for days at a time. Spools and strings, therefore, are too small potatoes for the puppy; he chases wagons, automobiles and trolley cars, playing he is hunting big game. He doesn’t creep up cautiously on a ball of yarn, not to frighten it. Instead he barks at the top of his voice to call the rest of the pack. He runs away to play with other dogs, because the dogs and wolves are social animals; and when he chews up a rubber boot, he is playing that the pack has killed a moose and he is gnawing the great leg bone.

Of course, the puppy and the kitten do not know that they are playing at hunting when they chase spools and bark at carriages, any more than a boy knows why he likes to climb trees or hit a ball with a bat. But you can see for yourselves that the difference between the play of puppies and the play of kittens is just the difference between the work of a grown cat who hunts small creatures alone, and the work of a grown up dog who hunts large creatures in company.

Not many young creatures, such as we commonly see, do so much playing as puppies and kittens, tho boys and girls do a great deal more. In fact, the wiser any animal is when it grows up, and the more it is able to do then, the more playing it does, and the more interesting games it plays, when it is small. Calves and colts and lambs do not play especially interestingly, because wild cows and horses and sheep do not do much except eat, sleep, and run away from something that threatens to eat them up. But young squirrels, kept in cages, sometimes play at burying nuts in the floor of their cages for their winter supply of food; and young beavers, kept as pets in the house, have been said to play at building dams of chairs, canes, and umbrellas, across the parlor floor. Always, however, no matter how tame the grown animal is, the kitten plays at being a wild cat, and the puppy plays at being a wild dog, and the little boy plays at being a wild Indian; all because cats and dogs and men have been tamed and civilized for only a short while, but ran wild for ages.

There is one game that we all play, children, kittens, puppies, monkeys, and I don’t know how many other young creatures—and that is make-believe fights. We do it with sticks and snow balls and wooden swords; the little animals chase one another back and forth, and pretend to bite and scratch in the fiercest manner, as if they were fighting for their lives. Most animals do have to fight for their lives, many times over; so did most men in earlier times, before we had policemen and jails, and when everybody had to look out for himself.

Did you ever notice that a kitten is ticklish in just the same places that you are? You stroke the kitten’s back or head or legs, and it is as pleased as can be. But you touch it along the front of the body, or around the front of the neck, and at once it begins to bite and scratch and protest its best. All creatures that can be tickled at all are ticklish in the same places; and all these places happen to be precisely the spots where the great blood vessels and other important vital organs are close to the surface, and where, therefore, a wound would be most deadly. So when little animals play at fighting and pretend to bite one another, they bite hard enough to tickle. They don’t like to be tickled any more than you do. So they learn to protect those ticklish places in their play, and when they get to be grown up and fight in earnest, they have already learned not to get bitten in those spots where the bite would do most damage.

So the young animal’s instinct is to play at doing whatever his ancestors have been doing for work; and he has this instinct in order that he may like to do when young what he must do when old; and so have practice in doing it, and learn to do it well. Unfortunately, as men become more and more civilized, they have continually to do more and more new things, while they still persist in liking to do the old ones. That, I suppose, is why some boys and girls do not like to work.

XV

Some Instincts of Chicks and Kittens

It certainly is a most fortunate circumstance that all animals are born with a natural instinct for doing the particular things which they will have to do to make a living in the world. It would certainly be most inconvenient if moles and rats had an instinct to fly, and birds wanted to hide in drains and cellars; if cows thought they must dive into the water to catch fish, and seals tried to come ashore and graze in the pastures. As it is, each creature has the particular set of instincts which make it want to do the things which it can do best.

You remember what I told you in first pages of this book about the little chick inside the egg. It lies quietly and grows, until it is twenty-one days old. On the twenty-first day of its fife, for the first time, the chick feels the instinct to peck. It has no idea why it wants to peck, nor what will happen if it does. He only knows that pecking against the inside of his shell is precisely the one thing that he wants to do. So he pecks away—until, presto! out he comes into a new and very much larger world.

By and by, after the chick has got rested and dried off, he staggers up on his legs, and begins to look around him. His eye catches some small object—peck! he goes again, and catches the bit in his mouth the first time he tries, unerringly. It took you weeks to learn to put your hand where you wanted it; in fact you couldn’t so much as put your fingers in your mouth till you had tried many times. But the chick is born with the pecking instinct, and hits at the very first shot.

Yet the chick does not know what to peck at. He simply lets drive at whatever chances to catch his eye—a bit of gravel it may be, or something very nasty, or even a fleck of light on a blade of grass. What is good to eat and worth pecking at, he has to learn by trying just at you do. Neither does he know anything about drinking. In the course of time, as he goes about pecking at all sorts of things, he snaps at a dew drop on the grass or a sparkle of sun light on the water in his drinking vessel. So he gets his first drink; and in the course of time, he learns what water looks like.

Some day, perhaps, the chick will happen to walk into the water, not seeing any reason why one should not walk on water just as well as on land. Then he will think how very wet and unpleasant water is, and out he will scramble as fast as possible. But if the chick were a duck, tho he would not know anything more about water when he saw it than a chick does, yet as soon as he felt the water on his legs, that feeling would start up his swimming instinct, and away he would go, swimming the first time he tried as well as ever he will. Yet a duckling would sit on the edge of a pond till he grew up to be an old duck before ever the sight of the water would make him want to swim in it. The instinct starts up only when the duck gets its legs wet. Either a duckling or a chick would sit down beside a dish of water till they died of thirst, before they would try to drink, if they did not make a start by pecking at something in the water or on the bottom.

So you see the instinct does not tell the animal anything, it merely starts him to doing something, from which he can learn more for himself. It is just the same with us. We have an instinct to creep, and after that to walk; these take us about so that we can see things for ourselves. We have an instinct to climb; but we have to learn for ourselves how much a branch will bear, and the difference between poplar tree wood which will snap off and spill us out on our heads, and apple tree wood which will not.

So you see that what animals know by instinct is always how to do something. It may be how to swim, or how to fly, or how to build a nest, or how to bite some other creature in the neck. Usually it is some very simple act, that will simply give the creature a start in life.

Did you ever see a kitten play with a mouse? The kitten’s instinct is to chase any small object which is moving away from it—spool, string, tail, ball, mouse, indifferently. The kitten sees the mouse and runs after it. But the kitten will not hurt the mouse as long as the mouse keeps still. You could put the mouse on the kitten’s head and let it go to sleep there, and the kitten would never touch it, so long as the mouse did not try to run away. But the minute the mouse runs, away goes the kitten after it.

We say it is cruel of the kitten to torment the mouse as it does; to let the poor frightened mouse think it has a chance to get away, and when it tries to run, swooping down on it again. But the kitten isn’t cruel. The kitten chases the mouse because it runs; plays with it a few moments; then forgets all about it till it starts to run again. But of course, the kitten is so large and rough compared with a mouse, that sooner or later it is pretty certain to scratch the little creature. Then for the first time, the kitten discovers that there is meat inside the mouse, and that what it thought only an amusing plaything is also good to eat. After that, the kitten becomes a mouser.

It is something the same way with a dog. His instinct is to pursue and bite large things that run away. If, therefore, you run from a dog, he will run after you; and having started running, he is pretty likely to bite. But if you pay no attention to the dog, move only slowly, and do nothing to start up his run-after-something-large-and-bite-it-in-the-legs instinct, the dog will bark, but will not touch you.

One might go on at considerable length describing one after another of the curious instincts of the various creatures we know. Many of these, however, you can see for yourselves, just by watching young animals, kittens, puppies, chicks, babies and the rest, and noticing what they do all of their own accord, without ever being taught.

Of all these curious instincts, I know of nothing more curious than the way in which the instincts of our common nesting birds play hide and seek with one another thru the changing seasons of the year. Each in turn comes to the fore, governs the birds’ conduct for a few weeks, then dies down to give place to the next; but only to reappear once more in its proper place during the following year.

When our song birds come north in the spring, one of the first things they do is to pick out mates, and get to work building their nests. We may be very sure that no young bird, hatched out the year before and building her nest for the first time, has the remotest idea why she is building it. She finds a spot in thicket, hollow tree, or barn, which somehow looks right to her. Then she finds that bits of string, hair, moss, wood, and the like, which she has never bothered her head about before, suddenly become the most interesting and attractive things in the world, and before she knows it, she is building a nest; the same sort of nest that other birds of her sort are building, tho it may be that she was brought up as a pet in the house and has never seen a nest in her life before. When she is older, and has built a great many nests, she will perhaps build the least little bit better than she did the first time; but it will take a pretty sharp eye to tell the difference. The bird who has never seen a nest will always build the right size and kind at the first trial, and build it almost as well as she ever will.

By and by there are eggs in the nest. I don’t suppose the bird knows how they got there, and I am quite sure she doesn’t spend any time wondering about it. The thing she cares for now is to sit on those eggs; and the bits of string, hair, moss, and wood which once seemed so valuable interest her no more.

Still she has not the least idea what the eggs are for. She merely feels that her one desire is to settle down on top of them and sit there; just as you, my reader, at night when you are tired and sleepy, just plain want to lie down on something soft. A little later, and instead of wanting to sit quietly on her nest, the mother bird is possessed to rush round the country, picking up things to eat and stuffing them into hungry little mouths. She can not possibly know what it is all for. She just has a sort of hunger for feeding her babies, as at other times she has a hunger for feeding herself. But a few weeks later, she hasn’t the slightest interest in these children of hers, doesn’t know them by sight, and is just as likely to fight them away if they trouble her as if they were total strangers. The hurry-round-and-find-something-to-feed-the-babies instinct has served its purpose and gone back into cold storage. Another instinct is taking its place, and pretty soon the birds will be off for the south to spend the winter. Next year they will do the same thing right over again. But how much they remember of what happened the year before is just one of those things that I, among others, would give something to find out.

XVI

Certain Stupidities of Animals

It is a good idea for boys and girls to keep pets. Often it is rather hard on the pets; but the boys and girls get much happiness out of their animal companions, and they learn a great deal about the ways of animals besides.

Any of you who keep pets could, I have no doubt, tell me many wonderful tales of the extraordinary intelligence of these horses, dogs, cats, pigeons, cavies, mice, parrots, rabbits, squirrels, and what not, which, according to their nature, share our hearth rugs or our back yards. You who do not, have only to ask the man next door who keeps a horse or a dog, or the woman on the other side who has a cat or a parrot, to learn that animals are only just a little short of human, and if they could only talk, would soon prove, as we say, to “know more than most men.”

Now there is no doubt that many animals are extraordinarily clever. I could easily fill this whole book with stories of their sagacity. At the same time, they are often extraordinarily ignorant, and sometimes extraordinarily stupid. And because you will always be hearing abundant stories of their cleverness, I am going to tell you sundry tales of their stupidity. Between the two, perhaps we shall strike a just balance.

Let me begin by telling about my own dog, a white and brown collie, whom I, in common with all owners of dogs, regard as uncommonly intelligent. When I tie the dog up, I use a light chain, one end of which runs on a long trolley wire fastened between the house and a tree. This, by the way, is a good way to tie a dog, for then he can run the length of his trolley wire and the length of his chain besides, and yet not have to drag much weight or tangle up a long chain. Very often, however, my dog, after running out beyond the tree as far as he can go, starts to come back again on the other side of the tree. Of course he can’t do it, for the chain is fast about the trunk. Now what would you do, if you were tied up that way, and found that your trolley wouldn’t work? I am sure you would look at once to see whether you had not got your chain twisted round the tree; and when you found you had, you would run round the other way and untwist it. Of course you would, and you wouldn’t stop to think twice. But my silly dog has never caught the idea. When he first finds himself caught up short, he pulls and struggles. Then he sits down and howls for me. I go out and walk round the tree the other way. The dog follows me; and at once is free. I suppose I have done this in exactly the same way fifty times. Yet the foolish dog never has learned to do it for himself. And yet he is a wise dog—as dogs go. I suppose the reason is that his wild ancestors never were fastened up on trolleys, so there is no chain-untwisting instinct to start him learning.

Or perhaps you think monkeys are especially wise little creatures. Then consider this case: A man had a monkey, and was trying to find out exactly what it did know. So he used to put the monkey’s food in a box, lock the door with a key, leave the key in the lock; and after many trials, taught the monkey to turn the key, open the door and get his food. Then he tried taking the key out of the lock and laying it down beside the door, to see whether the monkey would have sense enough to pick it up. But the monkey didn’t. No matter how hungry he might be, he would simply stand and wait until the man picked up the key for him and put it in the lock. Then he would unlock the door as usual and get his dinner. Fifty times in succession the man picked up the key and put it in the lock, while the monkey stood two feet away and watched every movement—but the monkey never learned to do this simple act for himself.

Should you like to try for yourself an experiment that will show you how little the wisest animal understands? Then get a wide-mouthed bottle (a milk jar will do nicely), put in it a piece of fresh meat or fish; hold it above the head of a hungry cat so that she will see the food first thru the bottom; then set the bottle upright on the floor, and watch the cat try to get the morsel out. She will probably not go to work at all the way you would; and your way will be decidedly the better.

Cats suggest coons; and coons, like cats, are commonly thought to be especially clever little animals. So they are; but always with an animal’s kind of cleverness, not our kind. Somebody who has been studying coons more carefully than they have ever been studied before, reports facts such as these: A coon is taught to open a box to get his food. The door of the box fastens with a bolt, and the coon has learned to pull the bolt and open the door as readily as you or I could do it. The bolt is now changed over to the other side of the door. The change completely baffles the coon, who has to learn his trick all over again, and that with almost as much difficulty as when he learned it the first time. Even coming up to the box from a different direction would throw the beast off, so that he would boggle a long while over a door which he had been unfastening with the greatest ease.

Another coon was given a food-box with a door fastened by a simple latch. The youngest child would have merely looked at the latch, lifted it with his hand, and taken his food. But it was too much for the coon. He scratched and scrambled and hunted all over the box; until in the violence of his efforts he fell off the top of the box and landed on his head. As he stood on his head in front of the box, pawing the air with all four legs at once, one hind foot chanced to catch on the latch, lifted it, and opened the door. So Mr. Coon got his dinner.

Next time he was hungry, what does he do but go and stand on his head in front of the box, and paw the air with his hind legs, till he hit the latch again, and got another dinner. In the course of half-a-dozen trials, the coon learned to put his paw in exactly the right place, and give just the right push to open the door at once. But all the time he continued to stand on his head to do it. It was not until the twenty-eighth attempt and the twenty-eighth dinner, that it occurred to the silly coon that he could lift the latch just as well standing right side up.

Still another student of animals has been testing rats. Now an old rat is proverbial for wisdom; they laugh at cats, and it is pretty nearly impossible to get them to go near a trap, unless they are nearly starved. Let’s see, then, some things that a wise rat does not know.